At the risk of sounding crass or insensitive, I’ll do my best to deal with the possible cause of Jamie Dimon’s throat cancer as well as the possible issues of a potential need for a successor at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) as tactfully as possible. Besides, what can I say that wasn’t already said by my good friend Michael Tallon when I was laying out my hypothesis with the help of an excellent article by Matthew Herper at Forbes today that immediately prompted him to blame the “nether regions” of Catherine Zeta-Jones’ anatomy (again) with a word that won’t be repeated here.
Not only am I not making light of cancer, on the contrary, thanks to the reporting of Mr. Herper (who must certainly struggle with his last name included in a byline while discussing venereal diseases) it was brought to my attention the growing prevalence of throat cancer in men like Jamie Dimon caused by human papilloma virus, or HPV. Consequently, I feel almost duty-bound to bring this subject to light as someone who was, until recently, not afraid to go downtown. Please, I’m talking about a taxi from the Upper West Side.
I’m no Mercutio either suggesting there is, nor calling for, “a pox” on anyone’s house. Namely for legal reasons, partly because I live in a country where the price of a contract killing is roughly $100 and Jamie Dimon has a few “Benjamins” to splash around (perhaps enough for the entire population of Guatemala where a few guns remain following a 30 year civil war), I’m not suggesting that HPV is the cause of his cancer, his lovely wife carries HPV nor that Jamie Dimon has been unfaithful.
Jamie Dimon’s throat cancer caused by HPV: Evidence suggests
But, Jamie Dimon is a non-smoker and from what I’ve read a light to moderate drinker. Throat cancer has traditionally, with countless exceptions, been an affliction that affects the heavy drinking smoker late in life, or me in a decade or so.
According to Mr. Herper:
In 2008, the last year for which data are available, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention estimate that 2,370 women and 9,356 men developed HPV-caused head and neck cancer, about a third of the cases of head and neck cancer that year.
And those numbers are on the rise just as HPV numbers are on the rise.
“It wouldn’t be unusual,” says Eric Genden, chief of head and neck oncology at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “This is an epidemic.”
Mr. Herper then wrote:
But Genden says that 70% to 90% of head and neck cancer cases worldwide are now caused by HPV; the American Cancer Society estimates that this year, there will be 42,440 cases of head and neck cancer in the U.S.
Kissing An Unlikely Cause
Consequently, the odds are that Jamie Dimon has throat cancer caused by performing oral sex on some woman who carries HPV. There is a small, very small, chance that this could have come from simple mouth-to-mouth kissing if HPV related cancer, but that’s as likely as you asking Pamela Anderson to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation due to her years on Baywatch if your grandmother needed reviving at an EMT conference.
While it had been my intention to look at possible successors at JPMorgan Chase if necessary, I’ve already exceeded a word count inline with the average attention span. A companion piece and Listerine seems the better way to continue.
Best of luck Jamie Dimon, I mean it, I wasn’t “Occupying” Wall Street, rather I was writing about it and you make it easy.
